DICE: Data Intensive Computing Environment

Real Testing * Real Data * Real Results

Power & Cooling: Important ImplicationsWhat are the energy challenges in data centers?

The explosive growth in the number and size of data centers and computing power is creating an unsustainable demand for power and cooling requirements. At the current rate, America’s power infrastructure will not be able to support the growth in computing to maintain – let alone grow – America’s global competitiveness.

In 2008 Avetec’s HPC Research Division, the Data Intensive Computing Environment (DICE) studied power and cooling practices and planning for data centers, including high performance computing (HPC) and enterprise centers as well as vendors. The resulting two-part study looked at HPC data centers, enterprise and information technology (IT) data centers internationally.

Research to date by DICE includes a two-phase survey of administrators representing more than 170 data centers and vendors worldwide that explored current actions, attitudes, approaches, plans and expectations related to energy efficiency and the growing problem of data center power and cooling. The survey has produced many interesting findings and clearly validated that both the HPC and IT communities are struggling with power consumption and meeting ever-increasing power and cooling needs.

The study found that most data centers lack strong mandates today to improve their energy efficiency. Fewer than one in three centers employ metrics for measuring and tracking energy efficiency. Half of the data center organizations plan to improve their measuring and tracking of energy efficiency over the next 18 months at least to some extent. In addition, the study concluded, “with few exceptions, the data centers are planning no major changes, and they do not anticipate any game-changing power and cooling technology breakthroughs in the near term.”

Click here to access the complete Power & Cooling reports.